More Words of Wisdom from Mark Zuckerberg

by Scott Edward Walker on October 24th, 2016

zuck-harvard-v2

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a short video of a successful founder, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and a brilliant entrepreneur.

In this solid, recent interview by Sam Altman of Y Combinator, Mark shares some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs and founders, including the following:

  • “Start with the problem you’re trying to solve in the world – [don’t] start with deciding you want to build a company.” (at 4:38)
  • “Part of what gets you through [the tough times] is believing in what you’re doing and knowing what you’re doing is delivering a lot of value…” (at 5:21)
  • “Sometimes you have to bet on something – bet the direction of the company or bet billions of dollars on something – and it’s not going to be clear if you’re right for five or ten years.” (at 9:08)
  • “I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible.” (at 10:02)
  • “In a lot of ways, building a company is like following the scientific method: you try a bunch of different hypotheses; and if you set-up the experiments well, then you kind of learn what to do.”  (at 10:20)
  • “When things are working well, you use data and you use the qualitative feedback you’re getting from listening to how your community is using your product to tell you what problems to go solve.” (at 13:17)
  • “If you’re actually trying to grow a product, I think often the best levers for doing that are within the products themselves.” (at 15:15)
  • “We invest in people who think are really talented even if they haven’t done that thing before.” (at 16:59)
  • “One of the things I think we have done well is giving people at the company a lot of opportunity.” (at 17:50)
  • “I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it – but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working.” (at 22:41)
  • “In a world that’s changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.” (at 24:32)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott

 

 

 

Comments are closed.